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Friday, August 7, 2015

Praise and Lament, Part 2: Lorca and the Lament of the Spurned Lover

One of the most
obvious forms of lament is the song of the spurned lover. The theme of this
sort of poem is: I love you, but you don’t love me, what the heck is the matter
with you? This is not as easy a poem to write as many sixteen-year-olds
believe. In fact, it’s quite difficult to do well. Why? Because that state of
mind is almost inevitably swamped by self-pity and by a presumption of
expecting undying love that is almost aggressive. This type of emotion is rarely charming
or deserving of sympathy. But it can be done well. One of my favorite works in
this vein is a poem by the great Spanish writer Federico García Lorca.

Lorca at the Alhambra in Granada

Lorca explored
lamentation as deeply and as lyrically as any poet. It’s hard to think of a
poem by Lorca that is not in some ways a lament. One of his most famous poems
is titled “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” a poem of mourning for a dear friend, a bullfighter who died in the ring.

The jilted lover
poem by Lorca I’d like to focus on is called in W.S. Merwin’s translation,
“Gacela of Unforeseen Love,” and in Catherine Brown’s translation, “Ghazal of
Love Unforeseen.”

Lorca called his
poem a ghazal, but is is not exactly a ghazal—I don’t think there was much
information available to Lorca about the form of the ghazal,. The poem is
ghazal-like in its mood, since a ghazal is also, traditionally, a lament. And Lorca's poem is slightly similar to ghazal in structure, since it’s in couplets. Here’s a
translation that I did myself, partly based on previous translations:

Federico García
Lorca

Ghazal of Unexpected Love

Nobody
understood the perfume

of the dark
magnolia of your belly.

Nobody saw how
you martyred

a hummingbird of
love between your teeth.

A thousand
Persian ponies dozed off

in the moonlit
plaza of your brow

while for four
nights I laced myself

around your
waist, that nemesis of snow.

Between the
gypsum and the jasmine, your gaze

was a pale
branch of seeds.

With my chest I
tried to carve

for you the
ivory letters forever

and forever; garden of my torment,

your body a
fugitive forever,

I can still
taste your blood in my mouth,

your mouth with
no candle for my death.

One of the great qualities of this poem is its unusual imagery. The images are dreamlike. The surreal quality seem to match the subject of the poem—a lover
who has disappeared, his presence as powerful and fleeting as a dream. The pain
of his loss also pushes the speaker into a world of emotions and imagery that
is beyond ordinary reality.

Lorca’s imagery
is also exquisite:

A thousand
Persian ponies dozed off

in the moonlit
plaza of your brow…

…the
perfume

of the dark
magnolia of your belly

It feels as if
this beauty of language is also relevant to the poem’s subject. A lament should
create something beautiful, exquisite, even. Why? What about describing loss
demands beauty? Does it somehow dignify the sense of loss, and counterbalance
the loss itself to turn it into something beautiful, to make it into something
lasting, such as a great poem?

There is another
side to this lament I haven’t talked about. Some of you may have read my blog on the ghazal. The ghazal comes from Arabic, originally. Lorca grew up in
Andalusia, a region of Spain that was a center during the golden age of Moorish Spain,
when the Iberian peninsula was under enlightened Muslim rule in the Middle
Ages. During this time in Spain, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side in relative harmony. Granada, the city where Lorca grew up, was the last area to fall
to Ferdinand and Isabella when they reconquered Spain during the Inquisition. Ferdinand and Isabella retook Granada in 1492, the same year they commissioned
Columbus to seek out the New World.

Granada is also
the site of the Alhambra, a gorgeous fortress/palace that dates from Spain’s
Muslim era. I first saw the Alhambra when I was hitchhiking through Europe at age
18 in 1970. The Alhambra—to use the idiom of that time—blew my mind. It’s one
of the most beautiful places humankind has ever constructed.

In Lorca’s time,
Spain’s Muslim past was dishonored, particularly in Granada, which was a
strongly conservative and Catholic city. Lorca was murdered there at the very
beginning of the Spanish Civil War. In his final and posthumously published
collection of poetry, Divan of the Tamrit, Lorca wanted to honor the
multicultural nature of Andalusia’s unique mix of cultures: gypsies, Jews,
Muslims, and Christians all lived together there and helped form the culture of that province. Andalusia is also the home of distinctive art forms: flamenco and cante jondo or deep
song, the music that flamenco is danced to. In the “Ghazal of Unexpected Love,”
Lorca is lamenting lost love, a golden era of love, but also a golden era of
Spain’s history.

To summarize lessons from Lorca’s lament—it’s important for the person lamenting to maintain
a certain dignity. The artistry of the lament has to be worthy of the depth of
the loss. Also, a lament can involve mourning on many levels, not just for one
person or one thing.Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7,Part 8, Part 9